to revisit every once in a while, and it goes:

"Everything around you that you call life was made up by

"people that were no smarter than you and you can change it,

"you can influence it, you can build your own things that

"other people can use."

And I wanted to share that quote with you guys because

well, for one it's just an incredibly insightful quote

taken as a whole, but more specific to the topic of this

particular video, I think the first half of that quote

can really help you to build the correct mindset

for going into college.

We are kind of in the back to school season right now

and I've been getting a lot of questions, via email,

via Reddit, via Twitter from people who are justifiably

worried about what college holds.

They've been told that the workloads are insane,

and there's just a lot of uncertainty and things that they

don't know about and a lot of people feel like they can't

handle what college is going to dump on them.

And I want to tell you, that yes you can handle it,

and you're gonna have a much better chance of handling it

in the best possible way if you set your mindset right.

So let me dispel a myth for you really quickly.

There was actually a survey done of college students

recently that found that 60% of students felt that they

were emotionally unprepared for college and more than 50%

felt they were stressed either most or all the time.

And honestly, these are worrying statistics and they're

not good and I'm hoping the content on this channel can

help, in some small way to bring those numbers down as

time goes on.

But there is a silver lining to those statistics and that

is the realization that you are not alone if you are

uncertain or stressed or afraid about college.

I'm 25 now, I've been out of college for three years

and I can tell you this "secret" of sorts, and that is that

nobody knows what they're doing.

We're all basically just making things up as we go along,

we're adopting models and best practices to hopefully

get the outcome we want but nobody knows what they're doing.

So the game is basically to appear to know what you're doing

and to make the best educated guesses that you can, and the

people who play that game best are the ones who constantly

evaluate their choices and the results of their actions and

where they're going.

But also the ones who have learned to react to things and

to adopt the correct attitude, and to accept help and to

seek out help when they need it.

And honestly college is a huge concentrated ball of help and

resources and people who are really invested

in your success.

So going to college with a mindset that you are going to do

as best as you can, but also you're going to adapt to things

that you can't predict right now.

And honestly that's good because that's the whole point of

growth, and in pursuing new opportunities.

If you know exactly what was coming, then it wouldn't be

interesting, right?

You're going to college because you're going to

find new horizons, basically.

And when you run into something that you can't deal with

on your own be willing to seek out help.

College has a ton of help for you to seek out.

For one, there are academic advisors, there are academic

success centers with tutors you can get hooked up with.

But, number two, if you're living in the dorms,

get to know your R.A.

I was actually an R.A. once, during my junior year and

let me tell you we went through intensive and extensive

training to basically be able to answer every question

a student might have in any area of your life.

And even if we didn't know the answer ourselves, each of

us had a huge binder in our dorm room with lots of on campus

resources and at the very least, we would be able to point

a student in the right direction for any problem.

So, get to know your R.A.

Now, of course there is a lot more you can do beyond just

being willing to accept help and one of those things is

preparing yourself for everything that college is going to

throw at you by reading books and listening to podcasts

that have been made to help you out.

This is actually what I did when I was a high school student

I went down to my local library and I read every single

college prep book they had on the shelf including one that

I still personally own which is, "How to Win at College"

by Cal Newport and I think this is a great book.

I also wrote a book on how to earn better grades so that

might be helpful and a few weeks ago my friend Mart and I

did an entire podcast series called "The Path to College".

Now the first episode was about how to get into college,

the second one was about how to pay for it, but

the third one was a much more holistic look at everything

your need to learn to be able to take on college.

It was basically the episode about becoming college ready.

So if you want a lot more detail on this whole process of

becoming college ready, you can click the annotation on

the screen right now, or the link in the description

below, but hopefully this particular video just helped

to ease your nerves a little bit if

you are still worried about college.

And helped you to set your mindset in a

very positive and productive way.

Now before I leave you guys I did want to mention one more

thing and that is that we just launched

a new page on College Info Geek called

"The Ultimate College Packing Guide" so if you're

still wondering what all you should bring to college,

this is our attempt at creating a comprehensive resource

that should answer that question for you.

And right now it's totally V 1.0 I still have a lot of

features to add but I wanted to get it up as earlier as I

possibly could so you guys could make use of it.

So once again, cards on the screen if you wanna check it

out and there's a link down in the description below.

That is all I've got for this particular video, so hopefully

you guys enjoyed it and if you did you can leave a Like

to support this channel and if you've got additional

questions be sure to put them down in the comments below

so I can make future videos tackling those topics.

Also, if you wanna get new videos every single week on

being a more effective student you can click your mouse

button on the big red subscribe button down there and

if you wanna get a free copy of my book on earning

better grades you can click your mouse button on the

picture of the book right over there.

If you missed last weeks video we talked about aconcept

called space repetition which is a really effective

learning technique, so check it out if you missed it.

And you can find the full article as always for this video

at the full article button right there.

If you wanna connect with me,

I'm right behind you.